Incinerate

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Incinerate is a techpower in Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. It is a high-explosive plasma round fired from the user's omni-tool that inflicts damage over time to all nearby enemies and permanently stops their health regeneration. Against armor, the damage this ability deals is 2.4 times the usual amount. Like Overload, this power causes unprotected enemies equipped with flamethrowers to explode.

Note: As with all projectile powers, the power does not launch an actual projectile when used by a squadmate. Instead, it impacts instantly. In Mass Effect 2, if there is any cover between Shepard (not the squadmate using it) and the target, the power will strike the cover instead. In Mass Effect 3, it will always hit the target.

Damage is dealt instantly against protection (armor, barriers, and shields).

Incinerate deals the listed damage amount against barriers, shields and organic health. Synthetic enemies are fire resistant and take significantly less damage to health.

Unprotected organics panic for the duration. Most protected enemies are briefly staggered upon being hit.

On higher difficulties, a leveled up Incinerate may be a better, and more damaging alternative to Overload against weakly shielded organic and/or armored enemies. This is because Incinerate is capable of not only depleting an enemy's shields, but causing additional damage to their health, whereas Overload would take down their shields and cause no further damage.

Note: Incinerate does 1.5x damage against armor, but only half damage against barriers and shields.[1]

Mechanics

Incinerate actually does only 75% of its damage up-front, the other 25% is dealt as a damage-over-time effect over 3 seconds (which is distinct from the rank five evolution that provides a damage-over-time effect).[2]

The rank four Radius evolution, in addition to letting Incinerate hit more than one enemy, can also circumvent some enemy attempts to dodge the projectile.

Like similar evolutions for other powers that bestow a damage-over-time effect, the rank five Burning Damage evolution is 40% (or 50% multiplayer) of the overall damage of the power (whereas other evolutions that increase power damage are based off the base—i.e. un-upgraded—damage).[3]

The rank six Armor Damage bonus is a multiplicative increase, raising Incinerate's total damage multiplier against armor from 1.5x to 2.25x (as oppossed to 2.0x).[4]

Strategies

Incinerate can be easily used on a spawned unit such as a Combat Drones to create Fire Explosions, as they can be quickly killed after being hit by Incinerate.

When used in tandem with Overload as an Engineer, or with another character with one of the two said powers, this combo is devastating against enemies with armour and shielding. Atlases, Banshees, Geth Primes and Geth Pyros all apply here.

Incinerate is also very effective against Reapers as a whole since most of their units are either armoured, or only have health and it destroys the bodies of creatures killed by it, keeping Cannibals from eating them. In the case of the former, when the Rank 6 Evolution armor damage is picked, it does an extra 50% damage against, potentially allowing for over 1000 damage to be inflicted with just one Incinerate on said foes (including damage over time). When the Radius evolution is picked, it can also panic multiple Cerberus troopers at once, making them all prone to Fire Explosions or vulnerable to additional punishment, e.g. headshots.

The rank six Freezing Damage gives a big payoff if the character has a method for reliably freezing enemies. In single-player, the Engineer has Cryo Blast, and the Infiltrator has Cryo Ammo; both of those options can make the targets take more damage from any source. In multiplayer, the female Quarian Engineer has both Incinerate and Cryo Blast while the N7 Paladin has both Incinerate and Snap Freeze. A little patience and a light weapon loadout will let you use devastating Incinerates every few seconds.

If you use Incinerate on a frozen enemy, if they survive the initial blast, but still die from the DoT effect, a Cryo Explosion will still be triggered.

Because the damage-over-time effect of the rank five Burning Damage evolution is relatively long (eight seconds), in multiplayer especially this evolution may be only useful against larger boss-type enemies (Atlases, Banshees, etc.) as weaker enemies may die too quickly to take much extra damage. However, the longer duration of the Burning Damage damage-over-time over the normal damage-over-time (8 seconds versus 3 seconds) does increase how long organic enemies are panicked (though it does not increase how long Incinerate primes a target for a combo).[5]